elemental links

Assorted Links - January 17, 2009

R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts - NYTimes.com

OSS SAS alternative: "R is..a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. “R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations."

The StreamBase Event Processing Blog: Case Study: BlueCrest Capital Management

Event Processing case study from Streambase: "In 2007, just as the credit crisis was breaking, BlueCrest set up a team..to develop a state-of-the-art market data management system. BlueCrest trades 24 hours a day, six days a week, across multiple markets using a wide range of data feeds. As markets move day to day and week to week, BlueCrest needed to rapidly reconfigure data feed connections and plug the data into real-time models while optimizing management of the necessary data feed licenses. BlueCrest devised a solution that combines the rapid time-to-market event processing capabilities of StreamBase with the instant storage and retrieval functionality of Vertica. It provides a total market data management solution that is able to meet the needs of low-latency trading and the demanding innovation of their quantitative analysts to achieve greater profitability."

Nine BI Megatrends for 2009 > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

Event Processing as BI Megatrend...sounds so 80's, nonetheless..."Event processing opens new analytical possibilities. Before the financial services industry cratered, that was where most of the work in event or stream processing could be found. Now, while algorithmic trading and other processes still consume this technology, the spotlight shines brighter on emergent applications in healthcare, telecommunications, government intelligence, IT management, gaming and Web analytics. Network events, sensor data from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and surveillance data are among the new sources. Capturing events, correlating them and presenting the results of analytics in dashboards can potentially give organizations more actionable insight than traditional BI tools provide. However, to gain full business value, event processing must be deployed in an integrated fashion with not only BI and data warehouse systems but also process management and service-oriented architecture."

Joseph E. Stiglitz on capitalist fools: vanityfair.com

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz on 5 key contributing factors to the economic crisis. Easy read, important to understand how we got here. "There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight. What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments."

The financial crisis: Who's really to blame? - Dec. 8, 2008

a keep up with cocktail party/coffee shop conversations version of "What happened in 2008? Chances are you can't succinctly express your views on that complex question. But the American public will settle on one of four catch phrases over the next several months. Whatever bit of conventional wisdom wins out will have an impact on the economy. The contenders are as follows..."

Assorted Links - December 2, 2008

I say 'assorted', but all but the last relate to IT efficiencies.

Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software - BusinessWeek

If you need some examples of Open Source Adoption and an exec friendly article on open source, check this one out. "As the recession puts pressure on tech spending, many companies are turning to open-source software to handle more IT tasks"

Why an Open Source SOA stack makes sense

Speaking of Open Source, Mike Kavis shares his open source SOA stack preference and points out a few others.

elemental links: Open Source Considerations

One more on Open Source. I wrote an open source considerations paper in October 2005. This post excerpts those 'considerations', which practitioners tell me still hold. Folks have incorporated some of these key points into new Open Source strategies for their organizations.

Continuations: Kaizen for Software Development Series

Intro to Kaizen for Development Series, check out the 5 posts to date. "Kaizen means loosely translated continuous improvement. It is a bundle of techniques applied by Japanese manufacturing companies. The goal of Kaizen is to break out of the notion that there is a fixed cost-time-quality tradeoff. Traditional thinking was that if you wanted higher quality it would imply more cost and longer production times. Kaizen posits that with the right process improvements you can get higher quality at lower cost and faster speed."..."I have found that Kaizen practices are also highly applicable to software development. Yet it seems that not that many folks in the software development community are familiar with the tenets and practices of Kaizen. So I am planning to write a series of posts that describes Kaizen principles and how they are applicable to software development."

When "IT Alignment with the Business" Isn't a Buzzword

disciplined approach to cost containment: "Well, let's be careful. First, project costs associated with large business initiatives are only one portion of IT spending. Additionally, cutting costs is easy; you just decrease the services you offer the business. Instead, we wanted to cut costs in ways that would enhance our business alignment, and increase (rather than decrease) the services we offer. To do that, we had to expose all of the costs in IT (PMO and non-PMO) in terms that the business could understand. In other words: business applications. We enumerated all IT budgetary costs by application, and then bucketed them based upon whether they were (1) existing services (i.e. keeping the "true" IT lights on) or (2) new services being installed in 2008. We then launched a theme of "convergence" in IT, which would allow us to converge to fewer technologies/applications that offer the business the same functionality, while increasing the level of service for each offering."

Inside Architecture : Creating a distinction between business services and SOA business services

Nick Malik provides a different perspective. His metamodel varies from mine, but an interesting point-of-view nonetheless. "A business unit may provide zero or more business services. Not all of the capabilities required by a business unit may be involved in a business service. SOA provides the ability to share features. Those features may provide information, or calculations, or data manipulation. They may also include the limited automation of some elements of a business process. SOA services are provided by "installed software""..."The point of this post is to provide sufficient context to challenge the notion that SOA provides shared business services. It does not. SOA provides shared features that many business units call upon. Those features are required by the business processes within those business units."

Assorted Links - November 14, 2008

Is it just me, or is tech reading/writing become increasingly tied to current affairs?  Here are some interesting links:

techPresident – Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do?

The US CTO discussion is interesting. Some people/organizations are advocating that the CTO should focus "internally" -- cleaning up the Government's use of technology. Others, feel that the CTO should focus on the technology required for the US to regain competitiveness and be energy independent. While there is plenty of work to do in the former, I tend to lean towards the latter. How can we harness technology and encourage technology-based innovation to move the nation forward? For more views, click thru on the link.

Telcos: Don't mess up the Internet with regulation | Politics and Law - CNET News

With Administration change, Net Neutrality to be 2009 topic "The next Congress is sure to introduce Net neutrality legislation, a Democratic congressional staffer said Thursday. "With the Obama administration being extremely supportive of Net neutrality, we're quite excited we can actually get things done," said Frannie Wellings, telecom counsel for Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D)... Representatives from the telecommunications industry insisted they have a common interest in maintaining open networks since their revenues come from carrying bits--but say that they're OK with the current state of the law. New legislation, they say, is not the way to achieve open access--and could even have adverse results. The Federal Communications Commission's ruling against Comcast proved the commission's approach of reviewing possible Net neutrality violations on a case-by-case basis is effective, said James Cicconi, senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs for AT&T."

elemental links: Net Neutrality – An Important Topic for National Conversation

My Net Neutrality piece from Feb 2006. An attempt to frame the issue – how we got here and the positions of each side. I do offer my own opinion at the end, but my goal in writing the piece was to present the issue neutrally. With the intent to engage more people in the national conversation.

SAP and Microsoft, Watch Your Back - BusinessWeek

tech consumption shifts: "As the U.S. enters what appears likely to be a painful recession, a major shift is taking place in how businesses assess technology products. They're under terrific pressure to cut costs. According to a newly revised forecast from market researcher IDC, growth in U.S. tech spending will decline to 0.9% in 2009, down from a previous forecast of 4.9% growth. But rather than just slice budgets across the board, many companies are switching to a handful of new technologies that save them money...the downturn seems likely to hasten their adoption. Chief among them are software delivered over the Internet, known as cloud computing, such as Google Apps; so-called virtualization software, which allows companies to run multiple applications on a single server computer; and open-source software, which is created collaboratively by multiple companies and is typically less expensive than the traditional kind..."

Business Leaders to IT: You're Still Not Meeting Our Expectations - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

This part reads like good news to me. The business should own business process and information definition. "The Forrester study also revealed that business leaders want their own staff to become more knowledge about certain technologies and become capable of playing a bigger role in facilitating technology for themselves. For instance, 59 percent viewed it as a top priority for staff to garner business process analysis skills, 53 percent said the same about project management and 47 percent indicated a similar interest in information modeling. In addition, 43 percent wanted to know more about collaboration tool configuration and customization, which Forrester attributes to business use of wikis, blogs, conferencing and instant messaging. Essentially if the technology directly impacts a business unit, leaders want to be involved."

Mindjet Player Offers Portable Visual Collaboration Maps

This looks interesting... "The crown jewel in Mindjet's new release is easily the Mindjet Player, which allows users to take the interactive mind maps they created with MindManager 8, turn them into Adobe PDFs or Flash .SWF files. These files can be shared with anyone with a computer. Or, if you don't want to share the mind maps, you can publish them in blogs or embed them in Web pages. "The idea is that I could send a PDF to somebody, they could open it up and what they would see instead of just a picture of a map, a fully functioning MindManager map with all of the content and links to external information," Rasking said."

Assorted Links: November 10, 2008

CIO's IT Budget Survey Results: July Jitters Turn to October Fear - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

Interesting stats from a recent CIO survey. Yes, spending is being cut. Nice to see some discipline in the approaches, developing and executing contingency plans rather than reactive slashing. Click thru for the numbers... "The results of CIO's most recent survey on IT budgets, fielded between October 17 and 22, couldn't be more striking compared to results from our two surveys done earlier in 2008. As unfavorable economic conditions continue, more CIOs say they must shave IT budgets, according to our exclusive October survey of 243 IT executives..."

Kaskad is Dead, Long Live Kaskad | Colin Clark on Event Processing

Soon after Colin announced the port of Kaskad's surveillance system to the Coral8 CEP engine, he ported himself there. Colin is now the Executive Vice President of Financial Services at Coral8. Good luck Colin!

Forrester: How IT rides out the recession

I get the first point, but the majority of CIOs run operations well? Really? Why such a high portion of budget to maintenance then? Can't we do better? "One explanation for the relative immunity enjoyed by IT this time around, if it holds up, is that a lot more businesses "get technology" than in 2001, Cullen said. A majority of business leaders now view technology as a core component of their products and services (82%) and/or as a differentiator (72%) in addition to a vehicle for reducing the cost of business operations (66%). IT financial management has also changed. Since the 2001 recession, CIOs have learned to budget lean. The roughly 70% of IT budgets that goes to maintaining operations is managed well by CIOs, according to Cullen."

Sun offers OSGi app server

OSGi will be everywhere: "Sun today is offering its open-source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server Version 3 Prelude, a Web application server based on a modular OSGi architecture with capabilities from the planned Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 release...the basis for the planned GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, also based on OSGi and Java EE 6 and due next year. "Glassfish v3 Prelude is our OSGi microkernel application server," said Paul Hinz, director of product management for Java enterprise systems at Sun. "OSGi allows you to have an architecture where you have a kernel that allows pluggable modules and each module can do different things," such as one that processes Ruby code and another to process Enterprise JavaBeans, Hinz said. OSGI provides a strategy to make application servers simpler and faster, said analyst Jonathan Eunice, principal IT adviser at Illuminata. It offers a smaller memory footprint, he said. "The idea is you don't load modules you don't need,"."

IT Project Funding: Less Is More - Susan Cramm

"project success declines dramatically as project size increases..Keys to fast-cycle delivery: * Executive leadership: Don't confuse sponsorship with leadership. * Clear definition of success: Use process measurements that impact financial performance and baseline them at the start of the project * Predefined kill switch: Take the emotion out of the decision making process by defining what defines failure, so that the project can fail fast and be restarted when conditions are more favorable * Small, experienced team: Wait to start your project until you have a seasoned project manager supported by a small team (less than 12) of full time, subject matter experts * Laser sharp focus on critical requirements: Avoid defining requirements by committee by using the success measurements to manage scope * Respect for the future and the past: Factor in the implications of existing business and technology plans while accelerating progress by leveraging legacy systems and existing infrastructure"

Is the credit crisis a boon for cloud computing?

There is an interesting article in the WSJ by Ben Worthen and Bobby White on the state of the technology financing business, which frankly  isn't good.  The article begins by citing an increase in tech financing defaults:

"Defaults on tech financings, loans that allow companies to purchase computers, software and other products, have spiked this year. The problems are surfacing after years in which such loans flowed freely..."

"...In September, 0.86% of equipment loans -- which includes a range of office equipment -- were written off as losses, up from 0.48% a year earlier, according to the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association, an industry group for 700 lenders.

While the numbers appear low, it's about the same as the percentage of real-estate loans -- around 1% -- expected to be written off in the third quarter by the top 100 U.S. commercial banks, according to research firm Aite Group. Tech-financings will reach $88 billion, about 14% of the total amount spent on computer hardware and software this year, estimates research firm IDC.

Businesses are now defaulting on loans for tech purchases "all the time," says John Dondey, national sales director for Baytree Leasing Company LLC, a Lincolnshire, Ill., unit of Baytree National Bank & Trust Co. that does tech financings.

While Baytree's default rate used to be less than 0.5%, it's now between 1% and 1.5% for commercial businesses, he says."

Naturally, this increase in defaults has led to an increase of rates:

"Lenders are responding by tightening their tech-financing terms. While some businesses were once able to get loans for software that required no money down or had 0% interest, some tech-financing operations are now offering rates to small businesses of around 8.25%, according to lenders."

And, hold on to your hats, some creative financing options by big tech companies:

"IBM, which has its own financing arm, says it has seen an "uptick" in the number of customers looking for credit. The Armonk, N.Y., company has responded by launching a new program this month that offers loans at below-market rates with no payment or interest due for 90 days.

Underwriting customer purchases "gives us a competitive advantage," Mark Loughridge, IBM's chief financial officer, said during a call with analysts on Oct. 16. IBM's financing unit had $24.5 billion in loans outstanding at the end of 2007.

Still, IBM has seen its default rate rise from 1.1% in the June quarter to 1.3% in the September quarter. A spokesman says IBM is able to sell repossessed equipment at a higher price than other lenders because it can refurbish and warranty it.

Cisco also uses its own cash reserves to drive sales. The networking giant financed more than $4 billion in customers' purchases, or about 10% of sales, in its fiscal year ending July 26. That's up from $2.7 billion the previous year. Oracle tapped its reserves to finance $1.1 billion, or about 15%, of new software sales in the year ended May 31, up from $891 million the previous year.

Collecting on these loans when the economy sours can be a problem. Cisco was forced to set aside almost $900 million for bad loans in 2001 after lending to dozens of telecommunication and Internet start-ups during the dot-com bubble.

A Cisco spokesman says the company is conservative in its lending practices."

Still though, some organizations are delaying or canceling spending because of the unfavorable credit environment:

"Nearly 20% of chief information officers say unfavorable credit terms caused them to recently delay or cancel purchases, according to 31 companies surveyed in October by the CIO Executive Council, a professional organization."

And, as the article points out, tech financing carries different risks than say housing:

"Tech-financing loans carry special kinds of risks. In the case of hardware like computers, the equipment itself -- a rapidly depreciating asset -- typically serves as collateral. In the case of software, the loans are often unsecured because it is illegal to resell used software."

Finally the cloud part...

What do people and organizations do when they can't secure a loan to buy a core (critical, foundational) asset?  They rent said asset (housing, office space, transportation, machinery, computers, etc.) from someone else.  This allows the person or organization to access the assets they need, and benefits the supplier who receives an income stream on assets that remain in their control.

So, I can't help but wonder aloud 'does the convergence of the credit crisis and the spate of cloud computing articles, offerings and announcements provide the perfect storm for cloud computing adoption?'  Will financial market conditions rocket cloud computing through the hype cycle to adoption?  Or, might organizations choose stagnation over the risk of early adoption?

As I said, I'm merely wondering aloud, but I'm sensing a correlation here.  What do you think?  Is the credit crisis a boon for cloud computing?